Blender 2.8 project status

The main topic of my Blender Conference 2016 keynote was the Blender 2.8 project; where are are and what to expect from it in the coming year. The biggest news is that we are really going to start working on it, with more developers than ever – especially thanks to the support we get from the industry.

The main sponsors currently are (in parentheses amount of full timers):

Blender Foundation (2+)
Thanks to donations and Development Fund we can keep supporting developers to handle daily tasks – especially for bug tracker reports and patch reviews. For the coming period we can keep supporting two (near) full time positions on this job. Aim is to involve the active volunteers first, with them discussions are ongoing or will start soon.

Nimble Collective, USA (1)
This Mountain View startup is investing a lot in Blender, via own channels and by supporting a half year developer seat in Blender Institute.

Tangent Animation, Canada (2+)
This Toronto+Winnipeg based animation studio recently completed their first 100% Blender made feature film – Run Ozzy Run. They currently work on their second feature, a scifi story with robots. Tangent hired own developers to work on Blender and Cycles, and supports 1 year of two full time developers in Blender Institute to work on Blender Viewport.

AMD, USA (2+)
AMD already hired Mike Erwin to work on upgrading Blender’s OpenGL, they recently hired a small team to add ProRender (open source OpenCL optimized engine) in Blender, and now support one Blender Institute developer to work on Cycles for OpenCL GPUs for 1 year.

Aleph Objects, USA (2+)
The makers of the popular LulzBot 3D printer accepted a proposal from Blender Institute to fund the “Blender 101” project – which is a release-compatible version of Blender configured for kids (education) or for occasional users. This is closely related to the goal of the Blender 2.8 “Workflow” project anyway – we want users to more efficiently make (or use, or share) optimally configured Blenders for their own workflows. This would support at least two full time developers on “101” and “Workflow” for a year.

The result is we can roughly assign 10 full time developers on Blender 2.8 in the coming period!

What it means is the following:

At leat three full timers will work on the Viewport, including PBR, new shader editing, layers, compositing, etc. Which means we totally get something in the course of 2017!

Workflow and usability will get a good amount of attention. We still have to be realistic with the goals but we for sure can make another big step forward to finish 2.5 goals and make sure we’re ready for future development.

Work on Dependency graph (animation system, duplication, overrides) and asset management will move on as well, including Alembic caching. We might start a flirt with USD?

And of course we keep our flagship render engine Cycles up to date for all platforms!

Blender 2.8x (and branch) will be tested in highly demanding production environments.

What stays open for now:

The “everything nodes” concept will have to wait a while. It’s not something for 1 person (or part timer) to do in a short time, especially not now we’re doing so many other projects already. This project also depends on successful completion of “depsgraph”, which will take many months – if not half a year.

Better news: the Blender Game Engine project might be getting a revival. The UPBGE team is very motivated to keep Blender engine work, and help with aligning BGE with the goals we set for 2.8 – at least to use the new viewport and pbr shader system. A new logic system is still undefined.

Workflow issues for non-open pipelines: we will try to cover some of the topics (UDIM support), but most pipeline-specific issues to integrate Blender well in production pipelines with other (closed) CG programs is still something we’d need active help for – preferably code contributions by the companies who need such features themselves.

Next weekend (25-26-27 November) there’s a 12-person “2.8 Workflow” workshop in Blender Institute with active coders and contributors to Blender. Participants are Jonathan Williamson, Pablo Vazquez, Julian Eisel, Paweł Łyczkowski, Daniel Lara Martinez, Sebastian Koenig, Bastien Montagne. Brecht van Lommel, Mike Pan, Sergey Sharybin, Dalai Felinto and myself. I expect we then can align a lot of ideas and requirements and agree on design decisions that will help everyone to move on for several years! Expect elaborate reports from this team here and on the usual bf- mailinglists!

Ton,
awesome to hear many people and sponsors are working on Blender and such amazing projects like Viweport and working on the UI. I just have questions about the team. For example: Williamson, Daniel M.Lara, Felinito, Vasquez, I know They are such amazing artist and long time Blender users making great contributions (code, ideas, time, addons, etc) to blender,
But I wonder if it would be better to hire full-time professional developers with 100% experience in code and not artists who eventually know how to code. It does not want to detract from the title of them, but I know that there are many great coders who have spent their lives developing software that would be happy to work coding and improving Blender from their experience 100% in code. On the other hand it is good news to have Van Lommel in the team, but it is not clear to me if he is full time because he understood that he was only half time with Blender Fundation. My question more than questioning the amazing work you are doing, is with the intention of understanding a bit better the decision to hire these artists instead of hiring coders.

Ton,
awesome to hear many people and sponsors are working on Blender and such amazing projects like Viweport and working on the UI. I just have questions about the team, because i see many artists coding, I know They are such amazing artist but My question more than questioning the amazing work you are doing, is with the intention of understanding a bit better the decision to hire these artists instead of hiring coders.

Develop007,
Well i think having artists creating all those tools for Blender is it’s secret of success. An artist knows the needs and struggles of other artists, what solutions are allready out there, what their pros, their cons and the trends are.

Well, hiring professional coders instead of artist-coders doesn’t mean there should not be artists who manage the whole thing. Artists may give suggestions and set requirements, as well as audit all portions of work done by coders.

The workshop participants are not here for coding, they’re here for to help defining and designing the 2.8 targets.
It’s important to have a good mix of technical and creative people to do this, and each of them has contributed to Blender and usability in one way or another.

You should continue the UDIM develop I insist because It will solve may problems on pipeline ( cache weight files and quality renders and also render time will reduce A LOTTTTTT) UDIM is not something seffish is a necessary property for a pipeline

I’m really happy for the entire team and blender community.
Quick and hold questions that arrises again, what about the VSE?
I would love to see improvement on the video editor side as well.
And it is not a secret that most of us needs it.
As long as it does not disappear, I would still be happy.

Workshop weekend was a great success! Three days of designs and reviews and passionate discussions has lead to a much better understanding of the work we have ahead. Reports are being worked on and will be posted on the code blog soon. Stay tuned, might take a handful of days.

I don’t know where to send a suggestion/feature request so I’ll just pop it here and hope someone will forward it on. I’ve invested a lot of my own money on Mocha (the planar tracker) only to find that now my Mac has died and I’ve moved to GNU+Linux I’m in the wind.

While I’m not sufficiently adept as a dev, it appears to me that the basics of planar tracking share a lot in common with normal tracking points but rather than looking for a small group of pixels in a search area, you’re looking at how a large group of pixels move around in 2D space (rotation, scale and such).

We had a plane track added some three years back but it’s hopeless in many cases where you can’t get a high-contrast point to track. It’s also severely affected (as is the main tracker) by motion blur. Perfectly understandable of course!

Planar tracking just seems to fuzzy match an area – often quite a large one to see how it bends and shifts. I suspect this means that you can apply a fast-gaussian to the search area and use that to determine how it moves. Edge detection might also work too but I’m speculating since this isn’t really my area of expertise.

The point is that this system is amazingly easy to use on footage that wasn’t shot with point tracking in mind but still requires traveling mattes or area replacement.

I can’t thank you all enough though – Blender has been an absolute godsend. I don’t know where I’d be without it.

for blender I would like to see instead of Boolean “negative objects”. just like in unreal engine, use normal objects but with the option and a short-key to invert them to act like holes for normal non-inverted meshes.

I’m a Max user but if Blender keeps the path it’s going on, I might soon switch to Blender for the majority of my work. My 3 wishes above will speed this process considerably I think not only for me but to many other Max users too.

Wow, I was wondering if you guess I added Drag & Drop from File Browser to 3D View or Outliner, Updated FBX to use 2014+, Select by Backculling (To flip all Normals 1 Way), Fix how some Operators work and have Batch Export & Import, but snap I didn’t know Blender was so big…I feel terrible I don’t donate.

I also like the fact that you use OpenGL, Python and have a Game Engine.

use something like PGI nodes, but calling native compiled code,
also add node containers, that can have user defined input and output as well as a different folder states, (state input and state output)

of course add a new python api, that is with better licence and python nodes,